Intravascular blood pumps provide hemodynamic support and facilitate heart recovery. Intravascular blood pumps are inserted into the heart and supplement cardiac output in parallel with the native heart to provide supplemental cardiac support to patients with cardiovascular disease. An example of such a device is the IMPELLA® family of devices (Abiomed, Inc., Danvers Mass.).
Currently, it is difficult for clinicians to directly and quantitatively determine the amount of support a device should deliver or when to terminate use of a cardiac assist device. Thus, clinicians tend to rely on qualitative judgments and indirect estimates of cardiac function, such as measuring intracardiac or intravascular pressures using fluid filled catheters. Traditionally, left-ventricular pressure (LVP) is estimated by measurement of a Pulmonary Arterial Wedge Pressure (PAWP) or Pulmonary Capillary Wedge Pressure (PCWP) in which a pulmonary catheter including a balloon is inserted into a pulmonary arterial branch. PAWP and PCWP are not an effective measurement of cardiac health, as the pulmonary arterial catheters are intermittent, indirect, and inconsistent, resulting in incorrect data which cannot be used reliably by clinicians to make clinical decisions regarding the level of cardiac support required by a patient.
Blood pumps provide supplemental cardiac support by assisting in pumping blood through the chambers of the heart, for example from the left ventricle or atrium into the aorta, and from the right atrium or ventricle into the pulmonary artery. Blood pumps are typically inserted to assist with cardiac support for a time period, after which the patient is weaned from the blood pump support, allowing the heart to pump blood unsupported. Because clinicians do not have access to reliable information about cardiac function, patients are often weaned too early and too quickly causing unnecessary strain on the heart.
Accurate measurements of left-ventricular pressure, cardiac power output and other cardiac variables could allow clinicians to make better clinical decisions for patients based on the current needs of the heart. Accordingly, there is a long-felt need for improvements over the present day systems providing information about cardiac support and cardiac health to clinicians.